Finally Aunt Mary, the general, could stand it no longer, and forgetful of her Saint Paul, she arose with all the dignity of her two hundred pounds and raised her hand.

“All be still, neighbors, and let Adam tell us the same things he’s been saying for these many months, and then we’ll let him shuck his fine clothes and come on home in my rockaway with us.”

“No, with us!” fairly yelled Cloverbend in unison of protest with Providence.

“Thank you, Aunt Mary,” said Pan in the fluty tenderness with which he had always addressed her.  “The governor doesn’t know it, but I can’t make a speech to you to-night.  I am going to catch that ten o’clock train for Argentina, to get some wheat secrets for all of us, and I want all of you to begin right away to plow good and deep so you’ll be ready for me when I get back in a few months.  We’ll have to inoculate the land before we sow.  Only here are just one or two things I will say to you before I have to start.”

For about ten minutes Adam stood there before those farmer folk and, with his fluty voice and the fire glow in his eyes, led them up upon a high mountain of imagination and showed them the distant land into which he could lead them, which, when they arrived, they would find to be their own.

The baby on my lap stirred, and I lifted him against my throbbing breast as I listened to this gospel of a new earth, which might be made into the outposts of a new Heaven, in which man would nourish his weaker brother into a strength equal to his own, so that no man or nation would have to fight for existence or a place in the sun.  Then while we all sat breathless from his magic, Pan vanished and left us to be sent home rejoicing by the governor.

Sent home rejoicing?  Suddenly I realized that when Evan Adam Baldwin had gone, my Pan had also vanished without a word to me.  What did it mean?  His eyes hadn’t found me sitting apart from my delegation with another woman’s baby in my arms.  Would there be a word for me in the morning?

“In Baldwin emerges the new American,” said Matthew, with a light in his face I had never seen before, as we all rose to go.

“Do you blame every woman in the world for being mad about him when you saw that look in his eyes when he held out his hands and chanted that food plea to us?  I’m glad he doesn’t beckon to me, or I am afraid Owen Murray and Madam Felicia would be disappointed about that June decision of mine,” said Bess as she and Owen helped Bud pack the Tilletts and me into the ark for our return trip.

“Will there be word for me in the morning?” the old wheels rattled all the way out the Riverfield ribbon, and I thought an old owl hooted the question at me from a dead tree beside the road, while I felt also that a mocking-bird sang it from a thicket of dogwood in ghostly bloom opposite.  “Will there be word in the morning?”

The next morning I awoke with the same question making a new motive in the chant on my heartstrings.